A curious email dropped into my inbox “How I learned to code in six months,” by Meaghan Jones. I read it and then joined a program called One Month. One Month HTML is a four-week course that intends to show how to build your first website, learning HTML, CSS, FTP, SEO, Responsive Web Design, Blogs and other things. This isn’t a pitch for them. They dropped me into a course on Ruby. Really?! I am a fledgling, but I thought, let’s try it.
I learned to set up a bash terminal, a zsh shell, and was shown how to find the terminal on my Mac and I even saw that Ruby already exists inside my Mac. They showed me some other things, and I found this all challenging and rewarding when I figured it out. Then school started and I put all that aside.
One step forward and two steps back. HTML tags and nomenclature, web building on Dreamweaver, CSS all coming back into the forefront of my mind. I forgot a lot. Fortunately assignments such as “what HTML tags do you remember?” helped. I am so grateful for the brave first responders of this discussion that guided me into looking them up. I remembered: selector, declaration block, h group hierarchy, sections, articles, etc.
The new stuff I learned where the obscure tags, and maybe not so obscure to the advanced coders. But the <pre> tag to create space. You can design images with letters and words by using that tag, or in my case create one line for contact information with diamonds as separating elements, in between phone numbers, and address info. Oh, and that the case, within the angle brackets were case insensitive. I find that funny, something insensitive. So if I accidentally capitalize a letter, I don’t have to worry about it.
There is much more that I learned in articles and web page links Professor Mead added. I liked the concept of making a users manual for me, as introduced in The Looking Glass, an article by Julie Zhou, “A User Guide to Working with You.” Getting organized through Notion; code editing tools such at Visual Studio, to name a few. And now I’m finally going to use that WordPress site I joined sometime ago to blog.
-Sheryl Rivera AAD86 Fall 2020
